US President Barack Obama announced last night that Al-Qaeda founder and leader Osama Bin Laden was killed by US special forces on Sunday in a compound deep inside Pakistan. In a televised speech from the White House, Obama said that a small team of US operatives launched a "targeted assault'' on a compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad where months of intelligence work had established that Bin Laden was living. The US President said the first lead had emerged last August.
After "a firefight," Obama said, the US forces took possession of his body.
Bin Laden was accused of being behind a number of atrocities, including the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, which have come to be known simply as the 9/11 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people died. Even with a US$25 million (TT$160 million) bounty on his head, Bin Laden had successfully evaded the forces of the US and its allies for almost a decade by hiding out in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And he grew so confident in his circumstances that he issued some 30 messages: in audio; video or electronic text, sometimes taunting, sometimes gloating, sometimes urging new terrorist attacks, the New York Time's Web site reported last night.
His death will be seen as a major blow to al-Qaeda but also raised fears of reprisal attacks, BBC correspondents said.
Bin Laden, 53, was a member of a wealthy Saudi family who, according to reports, had financed terrorist acts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East against Americans and other Westerners.
He was on the Most Wanted Fugitives List of the United State's Federal Bureau of Investigation since 1999. Al Qaeda has taken responsibility for the bombings of U.S. embassies in 1998 in Tanzania and Kenya. More than 200 people were killed in the attacks. The announcement by Obama from the East Room of the White House came eight years to the day after President Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Crowds gathered outside the White House in Washington DC, chanting "USA, USA" after the news emerged.